Day 4: The Slug and Lettuce

Today was half success half… I hesitate to say failure, but certainly a learning experience. We’ll start with the success.

I’ve had issues socialising for a fair while now, I’m not aggressive or disagreeable as a person, at least in my own eyes, though to other people I would think that I can be a bit boring; my conversational manner isn’t the best, I find it rather difficult to gauge the overall feel of a conversation and, as hard as I try to, I find it rather difficult to stick to talking about one topic for any length of time.

But today was different! I met my friend in town for lunch and as the title of this post may tell you, we went to the Slug and Lettuce. It’s a little upmarket for me in my current monetary state, but what good is life if you don’t splurge out every now and again?

We sat down and he’d brought a few of his friends with him, it was fine but I mainly conversed with him, after all I had little to no idea of who these people really were past their names (I hope they didn’t find me rude for avoiding prolonged conversation). As the lunch went on, I did however find myself getting more and more involved in the commentary on every day life, maybe it was the liberal application of red wine as the afternoon progressed or maybe I just felt more comfortable in general- in any case I had fun, and it seemed like he did too.

Now, to the learning experience.

I said yesterday that I would read twenty pages of a book every day, at least, so that I could get back into the swing of reading again, well… I failed, though not from lack of trying.

“The Wealth of Nations” is tough going, it’s a bit of a slog. I credit myself on being rather thoughtful when it comes to books and I derive a great deal of pleasure from rationalising a writers ideas into a form where I can retain, understand and apply them into my life (it’s namely the reason I prefer non-fiction to fiction), but my god this is hard!

Like I said, I like to think that I’m pretty intelligible when it comes to books, but this is pushing the envelope; I’ve managed to get roughly ten pages into book one of the series and upon finishing the second paragraph I was wrestling with complex political ideas and metaphors used to describe them. There is an analytic introduction to the book (provided by ”Penguin Classics”) that further vexed me.

Still, I will persist and eventually I will have read the book, hopefully granting me a better understanding of economy today, being that this book pioneered the idea of the ”Free Market” and is seen as a precursor to modern-day, academic business and economy.

On a side note, I did research the author, Adam Smith. Educated at the University of Glasgow in 1737 at the age of fourteen, he then proceeded to study post-graduate under the Snell Exhibition in 1740, both of these stints regarded his primary academic interest, Social Philosophy. Past this background and his obvious magnum opus he was a touch paradoxical… at least in my eyes.

Here is a man with mental faculties and powers of rationalism and reason that allowed him to create one of the most critically acclaimed treatises on economy and labour, that still stands until this very day I might add, whom was completely and utterly… absent-minded.

It’s comical.

Even to his close acquaintances he is described as being of peculiar gait and manner of speaking and in possession of an absent-minded smile of “inexpressible benignity” and was well-known to be scatter brained. The most notable accidents were as follows.

Smith took Charles Townshend on a tour of a tanning factory, and while discussing free trade, Smith walked into a huge tanning pit from which he needed help to escape. He is also said to have put bread and butter into a teapot, drunk the concoction, and declared it to be the worst cup of tea he ever had. According to another account, Smith distractedly went out walking in his nightgown and ended up 15 miles (24 km) outside of town, before nearby church bells brought him back to reality.

To cap all of this off, I’ll bring us back to reality with my daily necessaries. My sleep was rather off, I was awake through the night but managed to steal a cat nap for two hours at about nine AM before falling asleep again at around four PM only to awake to the news of a terrorist attack on Paris, France at one AM. My diet has been rather off, I have eaten at the restaurant today alongside my current meal of soup and a sandwich.